SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
pls don’t tell us off if you want to avoid spoilers but choose to read this
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Did you watch the ‘Westworld‘ finale yesterday? Did you DIE from how goddamn excellent it was? Same.
The way we see it, there’s two different reactions from two largely different groups of viewers:
1) The people who have been scouring Reddit threads and speculation posts and researching ‘The Timeline Theory‘ religiously in their spare time, so when ~The Twist~ happened, they nodded approvingly and sipped their celebratory beer with the overwhelming pride of a right smug fuck.
2) The people who avoided spoilers and speculation all season, and were FUCKEN FREAKING THE FUCK OUT over ~The Twist~.
~The Twist~ of course being that our beloved, beautiful, kind hero William (Jimmi Simpson) is also the homicidal, psychopathic Man in Black.
We’d been watching multiple timelines at once; William‘s story is actually 30 years ago, and the Man in Black‘s storyline is in present day.
They are one and the same person; William was driven towards a life of murder and bloodshed after he looked for Dolores for years (Months? Weeks? Not sure.) after they lost one another. He says Dolores helped him “find himself”. And himself was a rich, homicidal maniac who is completely void of empathy, both in the park and IRL.
We know, we’re devastated too. Shit’s fucked. He was such a beautiful kind boy and we’re bloody furious that he became this evil murderer rapist Satan-person.
Anyway! To the group that had no idea this horrible turn of fate was coming – you weren’t alone. Turns out that some other people who had no ruddy idea, was the entire cast of the show.
Even Ed Harris (who literally plays the Man in Black/Old William) had no idea. The only person who managed to figure out the secret that was kept from the entire cast was Jimmi Simpson (Young William).
Simpson gave an interview to Vanity Fair, where he explains how he managed to figure out the secret narrative – and it’s pretty bloody weird.
Vanity Fair: “A lot of your fellow cast members and even some of the show’s directors have talked about being in the dark about the narrative twists of Westworld for much of the season. What aspects of your story were withheld from you when you first started filming?”Jimmi: “The entire arc of William that you’ve seen was withheld. I had no idea. What I’m used to doing in my career is popping in and showing up for a minute, but it’s often a distraction from the story. I assumed I would be popping in for a little bit. I had no idea I would be running for the arc of the season.When I first picked up the can for Dolores, I thought to myself, “Well, that’s weird. Why am I picking up a can from the lead actress of this show that I just got on, this HBO show?” That‘s basically what I thought, and then as it started to unfold, I actually noticed something, just a little detail, and I said something to Lisa [Joy] and she looked kind of surprised I‘d worked it out.”
VF: “What did you notice?”J: “Well, I was with an amazing makeup artist, Christian, and he was looking at my face too much. He had me in his chair, and he was just looking at my face, and then he said something about my eyebrows. “Would you be cool if we just took a couple hairs out of your eyebrows, made them not quite as arched?” It was simply that, Joanna. It was that.”VF: “Just that?”J: “I was like, “Why would they change my eyebrows? Why in the world?” I started thinking the one reason was to make me look like someone else, and then I cycled through the Rolodex of the main players. There’s only one that really fit my look and dialect. They didn’t reveal any of that to any of us until about [episode] eight, nine, or ten officially.This was probably seven months before I was supposed to know this, but I just said to Lisa, “Am I supposed to be Ed Harris?” She just froze and said, “I can‘t say anything, but I will say you have a hell of an arc this season.””
HUGE.
Hopefully this finale keeps us permanently reeling for the next year, because the show’s creators have confirmed that ‘Westworld‘ won’t be returning until 2018.
BONUS FUN FACT: Director Johnathon Nolan has also now confirmed we’ll be seeing some of the *other* worlds in Season 2! We got a glimpse of ‘Samurai World‘ (name unconfirmed) in the finale. In the ‘Westworld‘ book by Michael Crichton (yep, the same dude who wrote ‘Jurassic Park’, ICYMI), other worlds include Roman World and Medieval World.
While they might not be exactly the same as the book, there MUST BE more worlds. Did you catch that when Maeve was handed the piece of paper containing the whereabouts of her daughter, it had ‘PARK 1’ as the beginning of the location? 
Source: Vanity Fair.
Photo: HBO.
